Ordinary diners who take part in our annual survey each spring review restaurants and leave their feedback, but we also ask them to score restaurants from 1-5 on food, service and ambience. Harden’s then uses an average of these scores and measures them against other establishments in the same price bracket to arrive at the ratings published in the guide and online.

Snippets from some of your feedback may end up in the overall Harden’s review, noticeably they appear in “double quotation marks”. The rest of our pithy, bite-sized restaurant summaries are compiled by analysing the survey data and extracting recurring themes, looking at whether or not a venue was nominated in any of our categories – like ‘favourite’ or ‘most overpriced’ – and, of course, looking at the ratings for food, service and ambience.

The Harden’s ratings indicate that a restaurant is:

exceptional very good good average poor

All reviews are compiled from survey comments and ratings, without any regard for our own personal opinions, except in cases where restaurants are too new to have been included in the survey. If you want the editors’ view on new restaurants in London you can find them in our Editors’ Review section.

News

Mayfair restaurant boss arrested

The owner of Mayfair seafood restaurant Assunta Madre has been arrested in his native Italy on money-laundering charges.

Gianni Micalusi was arrested with his two sons, his bank manager and accountant and is accused by Rome prosecutors of laundering nearly €900,000 in cash from “illegal activities”. He was remanded in custody.

Micalusi, a rotund 52-year-old former fisherman, has turned his original Assunta Madre in Rome – named after his boat – into a celebrity hot-spot, with photos of Elton John, Tim Roth, Sylvester Stallone, Morgan Freeman and Robert de Niro adorning its walls.

The three-year-old Mayfair branch, which boasts daily deliveries of the freshest fish, is no slouch in the celebrity stakes, with particular pulling power in the worlds of football and motor racing. Roman Abramovic, the reclusive owner of Chelsea FC, is photographed on its website, along with players Didier Drogba, Cesc Fabregas and Branislav Ivanovic. Formula 1 bosses Bernie Eccleston, Flavio Briatore and Ron Dennis also feature.

The 2017 Harden’s Survey gives the restaurant a general thumbs-up for its seafood, while bemoaning its “ridiculous” prices. Assunta Madre opened a branch in Milan in 2015, with Monte Carlo due to follow at the time of Micalusi’s arrest.